Information technology systems are essential to any modern business. These systems have grown more and more complex. Today they can include distributed centers located anywhere from a few miles apart to those across the continent or in separate countries. Today, personal computers are common and many businesses employ multiple operating systems from various vendors. Often systems are dispersed in branch offices running critical applications or containing essential data.
Tools are available that integrate operational control of multiple heterogeneous mainframes and distributed systems. These systems include numerous components that need to be managed. Typically, managed classes are used to view, monitor, and manage these components. The managed classes are typically predefined in operational software for managing the components of the system. In prior systems and consoles are monitored in a separate application from system components (applications, hardware device, etc.). The systems and consoles are organized into cluster diagrams with one top level cluster. System components are monitored separately in a similar arrangement by component type or system with tables displaying the status information. This is disadvantageous because it results in many different windows being displayed on the user's screen, and not all information can be viewed in one window. This is particularly cumbersome as the system grows larger and larger.
Another disadvantage is that the classes or objects can be nested deeply within an ownership tree of objects. Identifying an alert for a deeply nested object can be difficult. In addition. The name of the object may be the same for another object within the same ownership tree or a different ownership tree. Another disadvantage is that multiple topography diagrams are need to view state information for all objects.
For these and other reasons, improvements are desirable.